Stock market dealing

Says Justin, sneering.
Wrong again.

That's not sneering, it's a logical recommendation. If you aren't able to deal reasonably well with the constraints, then don't try.
LIke - I don't try to paint portraits.
 
Sponsored Links
Leaving behind the forum jerks, for those who are interested I found a couple of links with clear content. Clearish, perhaps.

For those who haven't grasped how it isn't like gambling, this short article encapsulates quite a lot, and is appropriate for people who are working or can only look at their screen/phone every day or few days.
Swing trading is working with a proce like it's the level of water in a lake. You don't know for sure where it'll be next week, but you know what the season is, the recent and forecast weather, whether water's needed to generate hydro electricity, etc

The "support and resistance levels " mentioned are really important. For oil, you see them at whole numbers of dollars per barrel. If the price creeps up to say $85 a barrel, some buyers will buy before it gets higher and sellers may have reached their desired profit level. So the price tends to stick at 85 until there's enough push to get it to move one way or the other.

--
Day trading uses many of the same techniques, just with some elaborations. Pick the usual shares an they'll move as much or a lot more, in a day.

A "learning" day trader has posted many youtube videos over the last couple of years about his successes and losses. He's lost a few thousand over a period, after making a few when the market was rising all the time. Even I can see , watching his trades, that he's doing it wrong. (Some time later he took a course or two and got better).
For his Youtube channel, he did a challenge with a pro trader he knows, and here's the result. They were trading an index. It wouldn't really matter which one, but indices tend not to jump around quite as much as shares so it's a bit more comfortable.

Spoiler - with $2000 and a week, the youtuber lost about 3/4 of it. Apart from a lack of knowledge, his problem is his own psychology. You have to treat it as numbers, not your life savings. Pick you "pot" level accordingly. You have to be using an amount you can be unemotional about, and call "learning" at first., and also be patient.

His friend the pro trader used far more % of his pot than usual because it was the challenge. He made some losses as it went, but when he had obviously done well he used even higher quantities because he'd done so well anyway. He came out with about ten times his stake - $21,000 iirc.

--
"Day" trading can be more relaxed than waiting for the twitch of a graph with your finger hovering over a button.
This is live, now (tho market is shut on Sundays), Ticker is "MELI".
1693749344121.png


That's the last few days, rising. In the box that's 25 trading hours ,= ~ 3days, ~10% up. Worth a punt that it'll continue for a bit?
You would put a "trailing stop-loss" on it, which would track up like the wiggly line (but much closer) so if the price tanked it would only go as far as the line, so you'd only drop back a little. (I checked, right now you'd set it to minus -0.4%, which would be covered in about 20 minutes, then you could only be winning). If you watch for some minutes you could stop it tighter, but better to give it a chance.

3% in a day is OK?
You could set it and check it after a day.
That's £300 a day on 10k, when you only risk £40 diminishing to £0 in the first 20 minutes after which you're in profit; it can't ever go lower.
You could start with a smaller amounts like a quarter of that, and add as confidence grew, if £40 is too much.

I would use 80k leveraged up to 400k making £12000 a day, starting as slowly as I fancied.
The minimum start is £14, so the loss could be limited to £0.06p.
With a pro account you can leverage x100, so that's 80k x 100 x 0.03 = £240000 a day profit, less some fees. Tempting.
 
Last edited:
£4K today from one bit of copying.. There a youtube of live daytrader pros. "DTTW" will find it.
I followed just one of their moves, "shorting" a co which has laid loads off, etc, called ROKU. I set it up with trailing stop losses and let it go after the spread-loss was covered. I checked once, and it had stopped-out, so I set it going again..
Overall I got 8% of drop (it dropped 10%)
£10k leveraged at 5:1 is £50k. 8% of 50k is £4k.
 
Sponsored Links
Apple are famously tight-fisted. They didn't pay out any dividends for about 15 years when Steve Jobs was in charge. W@nker.
 
...are they likely to go up when the iPhone 15 is released?
Almost $200m (£160m) was wiped from this most valuable tech stock last week as escalating tensions between Beijing and Washington threatened to restrict sales in one of its biggest markets: China accounts for roughly a fifth of Apple’s revenue. Reports of the Chinese government clamping down on use of the American devices by state employees may be having a wider chilling effect as consumers across the country are encouraged to buy from homegrown champions such as Huawei.

analysis @ The Guardian suggests they'll be in for a rough ride.
 

Things were not helped today by Apple's presentation of the new products. They were already factored in, and they're a nothingburger.
Apple are reporting associations with people for new tech, but they have to do something with it.

I do have some Apple stock, because I have spare cash in the trading account and had used Apple, so lost a couple of percent, relatively. Never mind...
Warren BUffet hald loads of Apple shares until a couple of months ago when he reduced the quantity and switched to US home builders. Smart move, the holding company (Berkshire Hathaway) trundles on upwards.
The US market is getting wobblier now, it was easy to find a stock to stick money in for a few percent rise in a short number of days for an extended period, but it takes a little more work now. Like you have to switch between
At the moment Im using US cannabis companies, because they're moving it from the heroine level(3) to 1 where it should be.

It's not that difficult, with Amazon 3.5%, Meta 3% , Tesla10% and Apple a mere 0.66%, in a day. MELI ( Brazilian I think) grew 3+% every day, consistently for a week to grow ~25%. No need to be quick for that.
But just at the moment the weed companies, ACB, SNDL, and CRON have been doing well, "growing" by 20 - 40% in a few days. The biggest one though, I dumped £xxx k into, leveraged x5, when it had already risen a lot last week - I was late (red blob). Still, it has gone on to double, so the stock came out 80% up. I sold a lot today. Market might go to pot tomorrow.
People say it's hard to make money.. Only as hard as reading, reading and listening and clicking. You do the sums.

1694556643803.png
 
It's all corrupt, of course.
But Oil is a particular target.
"All of a sudden" it was realised today(ish) that the US stored reserves are much less depleted that everyone thought. Which is why the WTI oil price hasn't gone up today.
"Options", give someone the right to buy at a "strike" price at some point in the future. "Everyone knew" the oil price was going up - say from 88 to 90.
So Options to buy at say, 89, would have been bought up in their millions. You'd make a lot of money with the risk that you might have to buy at 90 to sell at 89.
You could also have bought Options to sell at 89.
Another load of money.
You can trade the options, buy/sell the oil, whatver pays most.

The amounts of money in oil are astronomical, so, opportunities, if somehow you knew that the price would be low, that is.
 
Followers of Apple - I expect there are shareholders here - may be interested to know, if they'd missed the news, that the stock was hit when China announced restrictions on the use of iphones, in a tit-for-tat exercise.
However, when the new, rather unstartling , iphone was released for sale in China a day or so ago, all were sold in minutes.

Much of the high-tech sector is back to where it was in July or so. USA Investment advisors are suggestng that a transfer to broader based stock is looking attractive. So instead of the Nasdaq 100, towards the S&P500 or Russel 2000. Some like GE are atractive, at about 1% growth in every 3 days, month after month.
Other advisers of course say get out altogether.

UK side there's not much to crow about. Apart from a few - RR, BAE,CEN. There are some suitable for "swing" trading, like M&S. It's just hit the same high it was at a couple of times before. I have some I bought in the dip. If it starts to drop I'll sell it, and buy again when it starts to recover again. It could be up 15% by Christmas.
 
Last edited:
I don't like the "mood on the markets". US rates didn't go up, neither did ours.
Reaction is downwards amongst the tech stocks.
If I held them, I'd be reducing.
 
Mood is still down, particularly on the tech stocks, like AMD and Nvidia and the rest of the magificent 7, or dirty dozen - Tesla, Amazon(Alphabet), Microsoft, Meta, Google, Apple and a couple of others.
The suggestions are to look around for good value stocks (ie where the price/earnings ratio, and other measures) are favourable, in other sectors. Banking sector in the UK ( like Lloyds ) is thought to be cheap. Bloomberg say Canadian AIrlines - it's a monopoly, and selected real estate REITs where the properties are things like labs which are hard to move, are sensible. Consumer "discretionary" suffers when people are poor, but food shops are less affected. COmpanies which use AI to increase productivity should make it show in their Results, but it has aready been built in for some like Adobe.
Any of the big techs are capable of bringing out a new "disprupter" product, but Meta just showerd an attractive looking VR headset for a decent $500, which gave little reaction. A couple of months ago that could have been a 15% jump.
Fixed interest cash is becoming more appealing, if you don't want to get complicated.
A decent safe place to stash cash is the post office (NS & I), at the moment. Not limited to 80k.
Or oil, of course. It has risen as predicted a few percent, going from 80 to 91 dollars a barrel in a month, and will do a few more, probably.
If you didn't buy oil, why the heck not? 13.75%, in a month... Witha leveraged account, a bit more attention required, but that's x10, so your £1 buys £10 worth, you gained £1.375 on your £1, or a 237.5% return. So if you have a few £k in a do-nothing account, consider growing it.

If a stock drops below a price which it's held at for ages, you know it's most likely to drop further in a hurry, so you "short" it, leveraged at 5:1 say. Then if it drops 10% you made 50%.
"Shorting" it is effectively selling the stock, so when everyone does it, it forces the price lower. Kerching. Nice big compaines mean it's all "liquid" so for minions like me there's no problem. You look for likely contenders and leave an "offer" just below the established level, and wait.

Twitchiness abounds . Centrica got 2-3 good ratings and one low one. The low one made the stock drop 6%.

If you're ex BG (@gas112? ) Hold on if I were you - Ex div-date is 5 October, paid 16th November. Fundamentals OK, drop makes no sense bar being a bit pricey. Technicals show little reason to sell, especially now. Seems a healthy pullback. Trailing 12 month operating profits are £7.321bn for a market cap of £8.68bn and net cash position of £2.8bn. Seems a no-brainer to hold/buy more.



Apple has been falling with grace so holders had some time to sell, at -5%. Even now it's only back to where it was in June, up about 15% on the year.
 
Last edited:
Post #114 I typed CEN - meant to be Centrica which is CNA. Same as mentioned at end of previous post.

A few pointers if you want to retire soon, and are suitable: (cos if you aren't you'll lose your shirt).

If you want to simply buy some shares, there's a small number of cheap platforms which make it easy.
Once you're using the platform, you start to find out how some of them are up-front with where they make their money, and work reliably.
There are too many details for me to go through, and I only know anything about a few of platforms, but low fees I'm assuming are a priority.

Most brokers (ie banks, Hargreaves Landsdown) charge a fee for buying shares. HL's is £12, cheapest bank is £5 iirc.
Freeish, are eToro, Freetrade and Trading212.
To have an account with real money in it, you will have to prove your identity - photo of you and your driving license, etc.
But you should be able to use a Demo account with just a name and email.
The "demo" or "paper" accounts are meant to mirror everything you would have on a real-money account. Some, eg Trading 212's, doesn't.
eToro is over-promoted but it has a lot going for it. Freetrade, you might find a bit too simple soon after starting, and there's no demo account, but it works OK.

Some people make a big deal of whether you're getting "actual" shares or the platform is using their own money but making things LOOK as though you have actual shares. Bottom line, it doesn't matter. You still have up to £85k FCSC protection. Almost all of all tradng on forex, stocks, and most other things - trillions per day - is using a proxy of some sort.
If you want to manage the shares at all, you'll want to sell sometimes, then rebuy. You don't want a 10% drop to cost you 10%.
There are "spreads" (buy-sell differences), exchange fees (eg GBP to USD) and some others. Even when they sorta hide them, but they can be very tiny.

If you use Trading212, you'll have the 0.5% tax to pay on UK stocks. Not so with eToro. The spread's wider but less than 0.5% different.
An important thing with Trading212 is that you cannot set a Trailing-Stop-Loss, which is an automated sell-on-drop.
A TLS is a price which is based on the highest a stock gets to. It might be say -1%. So if your £100 stock hits say £150, the TLS follows it, and would be at 148.50. If the price drops, a sale happens for you. Peaks usually "fade" back down. Up to you to buy again, but you can set a price in advance. (Some will say it can gap past the 148.50 - very unusual and you can "insure" against it if you want, with eToro).

SO if the price is back at £110 you feel smug with eToro, and sad with the other two. True, it might go down to £110 then up to 200, but if you'd reacted to your Alert you could probably have rebought at £120 or better.
If you only want to ONLY use UK stocks (not advised) then you have to convert to USD anyway with eToro, but the exchange rate is low and you only do it to fund the account, not on every trade. They do a have a £5 withdrawal fee, which is what it is.

Trading212 has other problems which may get you eventually. The platform has loads of snags, and it's just tough if one catches you - you lose. I noticed three complaints which popped up in their meagre forum, then vanished. One was about following the instruction from their FAQ, which turned out to be incorrect. Customer lost a lot of money in fees.
I stopped using them months ago.

I now use more sophisticated sources . Loads of features, such as Alerting you if a given stock rises above 1% over the bottom of a one-week moving average, which would indicate a good time to buy.

If you wanna learn more, one link - go to https://www.trade-ideas.com . It's run by a very competent set of people. They have an expensive monthly product which is hugely popular - not recommended for a beginner , but loads of educational ebooks and videos too. And you get a look into what you can use if you want to get serious.
A site with a load of facilities which starts free and is only for charting, not the actual dealing, is TradingView.

Warning - if you're the sort who acts on impulse or just to try it, you will lose.
If you learn a bit and make a list of (about 4) things to consider and always do it, you'll win 3 out of 4 and only lose small on the 4th.
If you do the learning and are highly selective - my approach, you win 9 out of 10. Never ever expose yourself to a risk of about 2% of whatever your "pot" is. I would say learn the mechanics with a demo account, then move to real money after that "bit" of learning, with tiny quantities.
You will make mistakes and have things go wrong.
If I sat down casually doing small trades I could eg easily win a three or five units of money many times in a row, but then I'd lose focus or be a bit rash and lose ten. I can tell you when those are thousands or more, a stoic attitude is needed, not to get cross.
 
Last edited:
Money's in the "shorting", now that most things are falling.
Some individual stocks have just jumped. Fine we can short-sell them as they go down, unti the liquidity runs out. With bonds and Treasuries flying all over the place, nobody knows what the heck's going to happen. We all need lots of susttained inflation to reduce the debts our countries have, and the banks are heading for it.
There are more moves every day in the us/China trade war. Russia Ukraine, Israel/Iran by proxy, China Taiwan., eouww. Stocks could see much more of a dump, I use some profits to get another HMO, managed by someone else.
This is another period where the richer take advantage and invest and get richer, and the poor will end up struggling more.
Oil is the old monster. It was supposed to be going up, but machinations to make profits abound. Winter IS coming on but Russia is in sh*t creek so will let theirs out cheap . Sanctions are there to be got round, but Hamas will have put the price up.. WHen it starts to move I buy/sell it leveraged and make a few percent but not the whole change, then stop when it stops. A couple of percent every few days is a hell of an interest rate. Natural Gas did it Friday.
 
Last edited:
Investing in stocks and shares is for the wealthy with the ability to invest long term, or those with insider knowledge, bit like horse racing. Property is a much better bet for capital and income returns

Blup
 
Investing in stocks and shares is for the wealthy with the ability to invest long term, or those with insider knowledge, bit like horse racing. Property is a much better bet for capital and income returns

Blup

That's an interesting opinion.

Do you think an index tracker needs insider knowledge?
(Spoiler - it doesn't)

If you are a homeowner with a mortgage, you might have 500% of your wealth invested in UK domestic property.
Have you heard of diversification?
 
Sponsored Links
Back
Top